Tate McRae‘s new album So Close to What is out now, and it includes the track “i know love,” featuring her boyfriend The Kid LAROI. Tate says collaborating was a weird experience because, as she puts it, “I like to pretend he doesn’t know I’m a singer.”
Tate tells Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1, “We’d never sang in front of each other until August. I pulled him out for one of my shows. And it was so funny, we’re sitting in soundcheck and neither of us wanted to start singing … I wouldn’t look at him because I’m just like, ‘This is insane.'”
“It’s like a mental thing where I just feel like he’s never heard me sing, and I like to pretend that he doesn’t know I’m a singer, but he does obviously know I’m a singer,” she explains. “Doing the soundcheck [made me] so nervous, and same with writing in the studio.”
“But it was funny. It was wholesome. It was cute, but it was definitely nerve-wracking for both of us who are usually so in our element and so controlling in the rooms,” she adds.
“We both were like, ‘Okay, who’s going to lead the room?’ And we just try to not talk about work as much as possible, but it is hard when the conversation always leads back there.”
Tate’s romance with LAROI inspired another song on the album, “Greenlight,” which she says was “a perfect way to describe the feeling of falling in love again and being terrified to do that.”
“I felt really happy and excited, but I also had this…this ball of doom inside of me,” she reveals. “Being like, ‘Oh my God, I really don’t know if I can do this again.'”
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